/*
 * Licensed to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) under one or more
 * contributor license agreements.  See the NOTICE file distributed with
 * this work for additional information regarding copyright ownership.
 * The ASF licenses this file to You under the Apache License, Version 2.0
 * (the "License"); you may not use this file except in compliance with
 * the License.  You may obtain a copy of the License at
 * 
 *      http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0
 * 
 * Unless required by applicable law or agreed to in writing, software
 * distributed under the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS,
 * WITHOUT WARRANTIES OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied.
 * See the License for the specific language governing permissions and
 * limitations under the License.
 */
using System;

namespace org.apache.commons.codec
{

    /**
     * <p>Provides the highest level of abstraction for Encoders.
     * This is the sister interface of {@link Decoder}.  Every implementation of
     * Encoder provides this common generic interface whic allows a user to pass a 
     * generic Object to any Encoder implementation in the codec package.</p>
     *
     * @author Apache Software Foundation
     * @version $Id: Encoder.java 634915 2008-03-08 09:30:25Z bayard $
     */
    public interface Encoder
    {

        /**
         * Encodes an "Object" and returns the encoded content 
         * as an Object.  The Objects here may just be <code>byte[]</code>
         * or <code>String</code>s depending on the implementation used.
         *   
         * @param pObject An object ot encode
         * 
         * @return An "encoded" Object
         * 
         * @throws EncoderException an encoder exception is
         *  thrown if the encoder experiences a failure
         *  condition during the encoding process.
         */
        Object encode(Object pObject);// throws EncoderException;
    }
}